We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
This essay deals with the sociolinguistic aspects of the sources and perspectives of keeping the polylinguism of sacral languages within the Pax Slavia Orthodoxa, with a special emphasis on the tendencies of language politics and language planning within local Slavic Ortodox Churches during XX and the beginning of XXI century.
More...
2020 was unusual for entire world. Corona Virus was announced as a pandemic by the World Health Organization and it became the key challenge for the world. Unexpectedly pandemic changed a political, economic, social life, it also put the issue of changing religious rituals up on the agenda. It made a dramatic change, changing not only lifestyle thoroughly but also it influenced public values and fundamental principles. Georgia, as the part of the global space was not able to avoid the problem. In order to prevent dissemination of the virus, Georgian government closed the borders of Georgia for the foreign citizens, it announced the emergency condition, closed trading facilities, stopped functioning of the enterprises, enforced curfew, prohibited gathering of more than three people and set charges for violation of the rule. For prevention of the virus, different confessions were forced to introduce changes in their services. Georgian Orthodox Church was an exception together with several churches of the world (Poland, Greece, Serbia). The patriarch of Georgia decided not to change the service rule despite high risk. It became the reason for excitement and criticism of clergymen, theologists, politicians and citizens in general. There were different positions and opinions inside the church itself, among the clergymen. The society had different opinions regarding the fact. This step made by the church was evaluated by some people as anti-social and antihuman decision. In the country, where the belief and traditions are closely connected, change of eucharist rule and close churches for the prayers are very sensitive issue. This is why due to respect to the Georgian church and Synod, as well as for high interest of the society, we decided to learn problem deeper. Actually, the following questions were asked, like what was the cause for the decision? Why the opinion of the churchmen, as well as parish and society were divided? What is the role of the state in solution of such problem?
More...
The text starts from the experiential observation that, sometimes even some religions, with their national-fascist coquetry, betray the Faith and its moral postulates. That is, on the other hand, it is a question of defining fascism as a “philosophy of political monism” which derives its views from a single, for political purposes, life-humane principle. In this sense, the text considers any speech or action of exclusivity fascist, regardless of whether they find their support in religion, nation, race or skin color. That is, any other ideology of social one-sidedness that does not recognize and attack the Other and otherwise. Given the relationship between religion and fascism, historical experience shows that every fascism is religious: neither has religions resistant to fascism, nor does fascism choose religion. At the regional level, as the bloody war experience of the Greater Serbia aggression of the 1990s shows,the pathological process of fascism of religion has deeply affected the ethnoideological strata of the “heavenly people” and some high-ranking officials of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
More...
The article is based on the little-known sources on the situational pastoral alliance, mutual assistance and Christian charity of the head of the Romanian Orthodox Mission in Transnistria, Metropolitan Vissarion (Puiu), on the one hand, and Archpastors of the Russian Orthodox Church – Metropolitan of Rostov-on-Don Mykolay (Amasiyskyy) and Bishop of Melitopol Seraphim (Kushneruk), on the other hand, at the final stage of World War II. Biblical truths and virtues, service to people and the bright ideals of the Creator remained the cornerstones of the Christian ministry of the Bishop in the difficult conditions of the war.
More...
This article describes the experience of the community of Serb-Catholics living in Dubrovnik in the early twentieth century. It is based primarily on an investigation of the literary and cultural periodical Srdj (1902–08). This study focuses, firstly, on the conceptual ambivalence resulting from efforts to apply linguistic criteria to determine Serbian identity and, secondly, on the efforts to construct a mental map that would serve projections of Serbian symbolic territory. While the presence of the Serb-Catholic milieu in the city was short-lived (from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War), it nevertheless left traces on the urban landscape that typified the ambivalent formation of national identity along religious lines, as Croatians were associated with Catholicism and Serbs with Orthodoxy.
More...
This paper discusses the interactions and confrontations of the Austrian and Prussian officials with the religious community of the Russian Old Believers. They took place in two European regions: Bukovina (nowadays divided between Romania and Ukraine) and Neuostpreussen (nowadays divided between Poland and Lithuania) beginning at the end of the eighteenth century. The author discusses the officials’ associations and misunderstandings regarding the Old Believers. The authorities could not easily distinguish the Old Believers from the Orthodox Christians and had problems recognising their language. In many cases, improper data resulted in failed actions. There was a constant tension between the positive assessment of the Old Believers’ diligence and their refusal to fulfil the requirements of the state, like an oath-taking, military service, metrical registration, or inns’ building. The consequent resistance of the communities was often stronger than the administrative enforcement, thus revealing the limits of the modern enlightened bureaucracy in practice in the countryside.
More...
The paper shows the connection between the Biblical canticles and canons at orthros, the most important and most solemn part of this church service, through the example of The Service to Holy Patriarch Jefrem by the medieval poet, bishop Marko Pećki. The analysis of the structure of canon at orthros, a liturgical hymn that belongs to the corpus of old Serbian literature, indicates the possibilities of connecting the Biblical text with Serbian medieval texts and its influence on them. Connecting Biblical canticles with the hymns of canon is achieved through irmos, an introductory stanza inspired by the contents of the Holy Bible which links the events from the hagiography with the basic meaning of the Biblical text.
More...
In the lines below are, in translation, three Greek texts with an important dogmatic contribution. The translation is accompanied by an introductory study. The study aims to examine, to specify the foundations of the heresy of Apollinaris of Laodicea (ca. 310-392) and to fill this gap in the study of his doctrine. The whole Apollinarian system is based on the Greek notion of ἐνανθρώπησις, misinterpreted in the Greek way of thinking. For common thought, and therefore for Apollinaris, two perfect beings cannot be united, that is, the perfect God cannot form a single reality with a complete man. St. Gregory the Theologian will oppose to this heresy the soteriological argument, stated thus: "τὸ γὰρ ἀπρόσληπτον, ἀθεράπευτον" ("for that which is not assumed is not healed"). At the same time, this study examines the exchanges between the new Christian culture - freshly born - and the dominant philosophical thinking.
More...
In 1940, the British side granted formal consent for the establishment of the Polish Armed Forces on its territory. At the operational level, they were to be subordinated to the command of the British Army. Among the Polish troops stationed in the British Isles at the time were soldiers of the Orthodox faith. They represented an ethnic mosaic. The followers of the Orthodox Church serving in the army and navy included Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Ruthenians and Russians. In the beginning providing Orthodox soldiers with permanent pastoral care posed a problem mainly due to the lack of a chaplain of that denomination. This continued until the beginning of 1941. At that time, the head of the Orthodox military ministry was established for the branches of the Polish Army in Great Britain. The intention of the text was to present the process of creating a pastoral ministry, the activities undertaken by the clergy and the difficulties that they had to overcome in their service.
More...
The article presents the general principles of assigning to the entry words of the Dictionary of Polish Orthodox Terminology their Greek, Church Slavonic and English equivalents, points to problems resulting from differences in the scope of terminology in particular categories of headwords and their foreign-language equivalents, analyzes the problems and presents the methods of solving them, established in the course of work on the Dictionary, by using foreign-language equivalents of headwords’ synonyms. The article points to various sources and the lack of sources of some foreign-language equivalents to Orthodox terms presented in a Dictionary of Polish Orthodox Terminology.
More...
In the article, the phenomenon of yurodstvo has been recalled, which is a characteristic and perhaps the brightest realization of the Eastern Christian ideal of sanctity as a clear projection of its irrational or even specifically perverse potential. The examples which are quoted in the considerations and selected from a rich literary corpus (Old Russian, Old Bulgarian and Old Serbian), are colourful manifestations of sanctity in Eastern Christian terms, which can be defined only in a specific religious or socio-cultural context. For that reason, it was considered that this specially designed sanctity should be interpreted in the key of negative theology which is typical of the Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity. Also known as apophatic, this theology assumes the impossibility of a positive knowledge of God, which entails a specific helplessness of reason towards the phenomenon that exceeds all applicable established standards. In the discussed case, the reflection intentionally goes beyond the limits of exemplification of the sainted yurodstvo, since it also covers other types of sanctity, recognized and perpetuated in the Eastern Christian (including Church Slavonic) tradition, and shows the proximity of all projections of the so-called parenetic sanctity along with the relationship between the yurodstvo itself and eremitism and Monasticism. In this wide exemplification range, it seems justified that the incarnated sanctity of the yurodivy, a hermit or a monk, revealing itself in the socio-cultural reality in an unusual, incomprehensible or even perverse way, is an emanation of the numinous mystery which escapes the rational orders. This emanation should be, therefore, regarded as a phenomenon going beyond the boundaries of intellectual cognition, socio-cultural sphere, or a fixed standard.
More...
The author recollects a special event from the religious life of the members of the Diocese of the “Lower Danube” and of their Bishop. The event took place 135 years ago, when the relics of Saint John Chrysostom were brought to the towns of Galaţi and Brăila, by the support of the monks from Philotheou monastery, from Mount Athos.
More...
The author realizes a catalogue of the seals of the villages and churches from the previous counties of Covurlui and Tecuci, between 1834 and 1865.
More...
The purpose of the article is to analyze the influence of the South Slavic spiritual culture on the formation and development of hymnography in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the 16th-17th centuries. The methodology includes a systematic analysis, which made it possible to analyze and study the influence of the South Slavic spiritual culture on the formation of hymnography in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. To determine the temporal and quantitative characteristics of the analyzed material, statistical and chronological methods were used, which contributed to the identification of spelling and stylistic changes in Ukrainian liturgical collections. The scientific novelty lies in the determination of the characteristic features of the development of Ukrainian church singing under the influence of South Slavic spiritual culture. Establishing the difference in the formation of the two main directions of church singing in the Ukrainian territory, namely in big cities and peripheral spiritual centers. Conclusions. South Slavic influence manifested itself in certain spelling and stylistic changes that took place in Ukrainian liturgical collections. This process contributed to the intensification of the development of Ukrainian musical and hymnographic art. On the model of South Slavic graphics, a new style of writing was formed, which was called the "junior half-stav". Together with the change in spelling and literary language, the "weaving of words" was transferred - a special literary style that arose in Bulgaria during the time of Patriarch Euthymius. In Ukraine-Rus, the variety of translations of instructive and ascetic works of Byzantine and South Slavic writers in the spirit of "hesychasm" has increased. The restrained and austere tone of the previous era of Ukrainian Orthodox worship was filled with major Balkan-Slavic tunes. In the Notolinian Irmologions, polyeleos psalms and glorifications spread mainly in the form of Bulgarian and Serbian tunes, on the basis of which regional variants arose in the spiritual centers of Ukraine.
More...
This two-part transdisciplinary article elaborates on the autobiographical account of the Georgian Social-Democrat Grigol Uratadze regarding the oath pledged by protesting peasants from Guria in 1902. The oath inaugurated their mobilization in Tsarist Georgia in 1902, culminating in full peasant self-rule in the “Gurian Republic” by 1905. The study aims at a historical-anthropological assessment of the asymmetries in the alliance formed by peasants and the revolutionary intelligentsia in the wake of the oath as well as the tensions that crystallized around the oath between the peasants and Tsarist officials. In trying to recover the traces of peasant politics in relation to multiple hegemonic forces in a modernizing imperial borderland, the article invites the reader to reconsider the existing assumptions about historical agency, linguistic conditions of subjectivity, and the relationship between politics and the material and customary dimensions of religion. The ultimate aim is to set the foundations for a future subaltern reading of the practices specific to the peasant politics in the later “Gurian Republic”. The first part of the article starts with a reading of Uratadze’s narration of the 1902 inaugural oath “against the grain”.
More...
This two-part transdisciplinary article elaborates on the autobiographical account of the Georgian Social-Democrat Grigol Uratadze regarding the oath pledged by protesting peasants from Guria in 1902. The oath inaugurated their mobilization in Tsarist Georgia in 1902, culminating in full peasant self-rule in the “Gurian Republic” by 1905. The study aims at a historical-anthropological assessment of the asymmetries in the alliance formed by peasants and the revolutionary intelligentsia in the wake of the oath as well as the tensions that crystallized around the oath between the peasants and Tsarist officials. In trying to recover the traces of peasant politics in relation to multiple hegemonic forces in a modernizing imperial borderland, the article invites the reader to reconsider the existing assumptions about historical agency, linguistic conditions of subjectivity, and the relationship between politics and the material and customary dimensions of religion. The ultimate aim is to set the foundations for a future subaltern reading of the practices specific to the peasant politics in the later “Gurian Republic”. The second part of the article delves into Uratadze’s account of the aftermath of the inaugural oath and the conflicts it triggered between peasants, intelligentsia and the Tsarist administration.
More...
The article examines the construction of Orthodox churches in Estonia in the 1840s–1860s, focusing on the peculiarities and significance of that process as a specific historical and cultural phenomenon. These monuments, little studied before, occupy a prominent place in the country’s cultural heritage, especially in rural areas. The critical contexts of this phenomenon are 1) historical, i.e. the necessity of building churches for the Estonian peasants who converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy in the 1840s, and 2) cultural, i.e. the designing and constructing of Orthodox churches stimulated the development of professional architecture in Estonia. A significant number of churches have been attributed and the biographies of Baltic architects of this period have been studied for the first time.
More...